Leaving no pixel behind

Our daily job as programmers is to solve problems. Some view this as a just a job with a steady paycheck, rarely venturing outside the daily routine, not interested in learning new techniques or pushing their own boundaries. Some enjoy working on side projects, exploring new languages or just reading blogs to stay current. Hopefully, as the years pass, you grow and enrich your own personal arsenal of tips, tricks, techniques and ways to assess and solve problems. Finding the best solution to the specific problem at hand within the constraints of available time and specific programming environment.

Simple problems should have simple solutions. That’s kind of obvious. Except when people insist on creating artificial complexity while solving them, either out of lack of knowledge or out of fear that if simple solutions is all they have, they will fail to uphold their seniority status. And so you end up with people writing their own string replacement routines instead of using regular expressions, writing their own persistence layers with opaque binary blobs that serialize multi-field multi-level object hierarchies instead of using databases, or inventing WSDL and UML.

Complex problems can have simple solutions as well. At times, we tend to forget the underlying math complexity behind such elegant data structures as hash tables and balanced trees, the ingenuity behind bloom filters, Perlin noise generators and inverse square root approximation, or the sheer power of recursion that gives us such beauty as Quicksort. Once these are tucked safely behind library APIs – provided by either the runtime itself or written as a utility layer in your own project – they become just a few more entries in your toolbox, and you rarely spend time to appreciate their powerful elegance.

And then there are complex problems for which we don’t seem yet to have simple solutions. Sometimes you need to combine a few tools that you have, and sometimes you need to sit down and create a brand new complex solution. That’s what we’re paid for, after all. And then, sometimes, there is an existing solution. And it feels just the right fit for this problem we’re trying to solve.

Such is the case of using vector image formats for scalable graphics, which is most often boiled down to using – or at least trying to use – SVG for icons on platforms that run on a wide variety of screen pixel densities. On one hand, you have a problem of scaling your graphics on screens of various sizes and resolutions. On the other hand, you have a solution that claims to do just that. And it feels that these two are a perfect match.

And you can start by thinking that it’s a simple problem of scaling the entire icon up or down, and that it’s a simple solution of taking one of the existing SVG libraries and asking your designers to export all their assets in that format. And if your designers know what they’re doing, they’ll come back to say that they don’t want to just scale everything. They want to hide some visuals for smaller point sizes, tweak proportions as the target point size changes, or even switch to a different overall composition beyond a certain threshold. And while for you it’s all pixels, for them it’s points. And then you need to understand what’s the difference. And then you may realize that it’s no longer a simple problem, but you don’t want to throw away that nice simple solution. So you go read a bit more about the SVG format, and it’s this gigantic spec that supports embedded bitmaps, embedded fonts, animations and even interactivity layer that can run scripts on user interaction. And it’s no longer a simple solution. It’s this complex solution. And its complexity scope seems to match the new complexity scope of the problem.

And so now you have a complex problem and an existing complex solution. And it feels like they are a good match. If only you can just find the right subset of functionality and the right set of tools that will allow your designer to create those custom elements in the exported files. And with every objection your designer raises, you only are more determined to dig into the format spec and find a section that seems to be a good match. And as you dig deeper and deeper, the feeling that you have a good match becomes a firm conviction. And you never look back at the complexity you have built trying to match the “almost there, but not quite” solution to this problem. It was never “almost there”, mind you. But it takes time to actually realize that. And then SVG becomes another entry in your arsenal of tools. A tool that is not great – or even decent – at solving the problems that it claims to solve. Not yet. Not this year. Maybe the next one.

Thanks for stopping by. My name is Kirill Grouchnikov and I am a user interface engineer. I work at Google on the Android team. You can also find me on Google+.